“No chance of walking away from it?”
“I already made three calls on Undean’s phone.”
“You’re fucked then.”
“I already know that, Granny. Now gimme Mott’s number.”
Haynes recited Mott’s home number only once and Burns said, “Now lemme talk to Padillo.”
“You’re out in Reston?” said Padillo when he came back on the line.
“Right.”
“Okay. That’s Fairfax County. Dial 911 and tell whoever answers your name, the address and that you’ve found a dead body. Then hang up and call your lawyer. In fact, you’d better call him first.”
“Christ, you’re making it sound like I got something to worry about.”
“Tinker, the D.C. and Fairfax County cops are going to climb all over anybody who finds two dead bodies in three days. So keep your mouth shut until your lawyer gets there.”
“You don’t think I oughta tell them how I saw the hitter coming out of the dead guy’s house wearing a ski mask, dark glasses and carrying a pair of skis over one shoulder?”
There was a long silence until Padillo said very softly, “I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”
Burns chuckled. “That’s what I figured you’d wish.”
Chapter 25
Seated in leather armchairs before three blazing pine logs that occasionally spat and hissed at the fire screen, McCorkle and Padillo resembled nothing so much as a pair of senior club members listening with mild interest to a younger member’s account of the so-so polo match he had just witnessed.
What they were actually listening to was Granville Haynes’s theory of how his dead father and the equally dead Isabelle Gelinet had conspired to sell Steadfast Haynes’s nonexistent memoirs for large sums.
“Sums?” McCorkle said.
“Steady would’ve figured out how to sell them more than once.”
“And Isabelle?” Padillo said.
“If she and Steady were working a con, and if Isabelle decided to solo on after he died, she could’ve made some basic mistake. Steady was always very cautious, very secretive, and he might not’ve told her what step two was. So it could be that Isabelle skipped from step one to step three, missed step two, tripped, fell and drowned.”
Padillo rose, looked at his watch, saw it was 12:32 P.M. and asked, “Who wants a drink?”
Both Haynes and McCorkle asked for Scotch and water. Padillo turned and headed for the small dining room that was really an extension of the living room. To the left of the dining room was the kitchen and, beyond that, the tiny snow-covered backyard. The yard was divided between a ten-by-twelve-foot garden, in which Padillo grew roses and basil, and a one-car alley garage, in which he kept his 1972 Mercedes 280 SL coupe.
His small white brick Foggy Bottom row house sat on a thirty-foot lot and would have had a flat front were it not for a bay window that McCorkle said made it look seven months pregnant. The house had two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Downstairs were the living and dining rooms, kitchen, a half-bath and another flight of stairs that led down to the full basement, where there was a regulation Brunswick snooker table, at least sixty years old.
The snooker table had come with the house and nobody remembered how it had made it down the stairs and into the basement that also contained the furnace and a washer and dryer. The basement was a place Padillo tried not to visit more than three or four times a year.
He had bought the house the day Richard Nixon resigned and furnished it the following Saturday morning by walking through an upscale furniture store out on Wisconsin Avenue and pointing to floor samples that could be delivered that same afternoon. He had wound up with a lot of leather, tweed, teak and pine stuff that McCorkle told him made the downstairs look like a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Padillo had replied that that was exactly how he wanted it to look.
The only memorable pieces in the house were the dining room’s refectory table, reportedly four hundred years old, and the intricately carved mahogany sideboard that Padillo used as a bar. A young candy heiress, now more than twenty years dead, had given him the refectory table as a birthday present. He had bought the sideboard from a former first secretary at the Finnish embassy who needed the money to pay off some poker debts.
Padillo returned with the drinks, carrying two in his left hand and one in his right. He served McCorkle first, then Haynes and said, “What makes you so sure Steady’s memoirs don’t exist?”
“You saw the so-called manuscript I left in your safe?”
Padillo nodded as he sat back down in the leather chair, but McCorkle said, “I never saw it.”
“Three hundred and eighty-odd mostly blank pages,” Padillo said.
“That should miff the lady with the Sauer,” McCorkle said.
Haynes said, “Let’s come back to her.”
McCorkle shrugged. “No hurry.”
After tasting his drink, Haynes said, “When Erika and I reached Steady’s farm yesterday, his ex-wife was there. The fourth and last one. Letitia Melon. You two know her?”
“We know Letty,” Padillo said.
